


Mistress of the House

by coffeehousehaunt



Category: Lost Girl
Genre: Character Study, Cultural appropriation on Kenzi's part, Fix-it fic, Gen, Grieving, Shadow Thief, Spain, continuity, s5
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-02-28
Updated: 2015-02-28
Packaged: 2018-03-15 14:47:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,013
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3451016
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/coffeehousehaunt/pseuds/coffeehousehaunt
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"The cab pulls up the hill in the dark for what feels like hours. That could also be the jet lag, though. Kenzi startles a little when the cab screeches to a halt—not that she was falling <i>asleep</i> or anything."</p>
            </blockquote>





	Mistress of the House

**Author's Note:**

> Knee-jerk reactions to S5, plus a few headcanons and season-length WIPs I've got in the works. I'm just putting my brainstorming out there because it had some pretty moments in it. 
> 
> Also, I apologize for my terrible, _terrible_ Spanish. I haven't studied it since I graduated. I really need to pick it back up. The grammar is correct (if awkward) and peninsular, but I don't think Hale probably wrote in very _correct_ peninsular Spanish. His surname is Santiago, tho, and he left her a castle in Spain, so I took it from there.

The cab pulls up the hill in the dark for what feels like hours. That could also be the jet lag, though. Kenzi startles a little when the cab screeches to a halt—not that she was falling _asleep_ or anything. 

“ _'Qui?_ ”There's shadows on shadows out here, but she can make out one looming over them. Three stories, at least. It even has towers. But there's not a single visible light on in the whole structure. 

The driver nods. “ _Sí._ ” 

She hands him the bills—she's sure it's the right amount, but hell if she remembers what that amount is, at this point. The driver's lapsed into this weird semi-religious silence, too, as they've gotten closer and closer to the place itself; it's totally his fault she was falling asleep. 

Also, she was totally _not_ falling asleep. 

Once she's grabbed her bags out of the backseat and started towards the shadow—jesus, the driver didn't even pull up to the _front_ —the driver peels out, gravel flying. She almost thinks _Is this place haunted?_

Then she remembers. 

It feels like a long, long walk in the dark, and all she's aware of are the shadows and the ocean. She thought they were pretty high up, but there's a low roar constant in her ears, and that smell of water—fine, according to the Good Doctor, you can't _smell_ water, but you can definitely _smell water_. Smell the heaviness in the air and the sharpness of the salt. She walks through the roar and the dark, towards the looming shadow of the house. 

There's a blinding flash, and she drops her bags and throws up one arm—the other reaches for the gun holstered at her ribcage, hidden by the jacket she's wearing. There's only so many places you can put a gun with this outfit, and her cleavage was taken up by her cell phone. 

When nothing reaches her ears except her roaring heartbeat and the distant sound of flying gravel, nothing but red-brown dirt visible in the bleaching fluorescent wash, she lowers her arm. 

Floodlights. Modern. Now she _really_ can't see any lights on the house itself. But, she can see the door. Or, rather, a trellis and vines overhanging it; there are lights lighting up a walkway that stretches away behind a wall. The rest of the house is invisible, now, behind the blinding light. 

She holsters the gun and picks up the bags, but leaves the strap loose. Hale wouldn't have left her a _haunted_ house. 

Actually, it's exactly the sort of stupid prank he'd play. 

She hisses a breath out through her teeth, shifts her other bag so that she has one hand free, and pulls her gun. If this were _Star Wars_ , she'd probably find a little green alien waiting for her, leaning on his walking cane, and lecturing her about how _you find what you bring with you_ —like Trick, she thinks, but green and pimped-out—but the Fae are less Yoda and more _Alien_. 

Ew. Less visual. 

The walkway would be more enjoyable—hello, Mediterranean cruise—if she wasn't watching for any of the vines moving to eat her or something. The wind rushes stronger, now, around the sides of the mansion; the vines rustle, and the waves rush, out of her field of vision but still definitely there. It's at once comforting and creepy—anything could be moving in that all-encompassing noise, and she knows better than to assume nothing's there just because she can't hear it. 

But it makes her think of him, and her eyes clear and her shoulders relax. Against her will, her muscles warm and loosen, like on some bone-deep level part of her thinks _it's safe_. To let the sound wrap her up and hold her. The wind is warm—no more of that Toronto bite—and she's almost to the door and she hasn't died yet. 

The other part of her is desperately clinging to any shred of alertness she has left, fighting against the wind and the waves and all their alluring easy rhythm. Because if the Fae are anything, it's _not_ easy. Her fingers tighten; loosen; don't need to shoot herself in the foot because she got a little glamoured. 

The door itself is deep and bright, polished so that it nearly glows, even in the starkly modern automatic light. There's a scallop shell knocker in an almost red golden color, and carvings all around the edges. She looks—nothing she knows about. No spells that she's aware of. No runes or heiroglyphs or weird shifter language. 

She could knock. But it's her house. 

She pushes down on the huge handle with her gun hand, pushes the door wide open, pointing straight down the hallway. Super reassuring, how the door's _unlocked_. 

The lights come on—is every inch of this place motion-sensitive? Not that she minds or anything. It's just gonna take some getting used to. 

Okay. This ain't gonna happen itself. 

Kenzi bites the inside of her cheek and steps over the threshold. 

***

Nothing happens. Nothing comes rushing out at her; no sudden flames keeping her from crossing the threshold. And nobody appears to take her coat. Okay, _that's_ a little disappointing. 

She kicks the door closed behind her, keeping her eyes and the gun forward, and only drops her bags when she hears the door shut. The roar of the ocean gets quieter, but she can still hear it, faintly; there must be windows open somewhere. She relaxes and looks around; moves forward and checks the first T-section, like D-man taught her. 

An oil-slick sheen catches her eye—and is that mother of frickin' _pearl_ on the inside of the door? 

And they left it _unlocked_? 

Some neighbors. 

Kenzi swallows; can't find the voice to shout, _Hello_? That's how horror movies start. But there are wide stone tiles under her feet; the echo of her heels fades and dies in seconds there, in the hallways and the wide stones. 

They know she's here, anyways. 

The first room she comes to [looks like some kind of living room, except there's another one after that, and then a third one, with a sliding glass door and that open window and holy _balls_. She can see lights glittering down the coastline, but there's only a few of them, for the most part— 

She can see the stars. 

Like, she's not a noob, she's been out of the city before—the suburbs count, right? She's been to those. She's been to the shittier sections of town, with their flickering lighting and bulbs that haven't been changed since the '70s. She could probably point out Orion on a clear night. 

But it pours down the sky off-center, and she didn't really get why they called it the Milky Way. There's probably a story about how some god jizzed in his pants—

Oh wait. That's all of them. 

Her luggage is still sitting there when she comes back for it, small and ominous, and even though it's clean and pretty, it looks kind of shabby compared to the massive entryway and the internal glow everything seems to have here and the mother-of-pearl on the damn _door_. 

It makes more sense than _periwinkle_. She will say that. (She teased Hale about that for _months_ ; he never told her. She has to swallow the ache in her throat.) 

She sets the gun down on a low glass table next to a couch, and opens one of her bags. Tries not to rush; that stupid horror-movie thing. _Don't show fear; it can smell fear_. The zipper sounds like someone ripping corduroy. 

She pulls the sage, and a lighter from her pocket, and lights it; it smells like the shitty spliffs her cousin used to sell, but it makes her relax almost immediately, and not in that weird way that the sound of the ocean does, the strange magic of this place. She walks the perimeter, and draws the doorways, and it feels like carving out some kind of space for herself. The sage smolders in an ashtray while she waits for it to go out, and the smell evaporates into the smell of the waves, somewhere out there. Disappears into the old quiet of the house. 

It's not reassuring, but it's enough. She stashes her luggage in a corner, out of sight; but before she does, she pulls the white fedora out of her suitcase and lays it on the table, like an insignia or an identifier— _I belong here_. She curls up just next to her luggage, on the edge of the couch. She can't even pretend to close her eyes; there's too many open spaces, the ceilings are high and shadowed in the low-key modern lighting. She feels small; she curls up smaller. Hopes no one notices. 

She doesn't think she's going to sleep, even though she's exhausted; she's been going for close to thirty hours straight, and her blood buzzes knowing that somewhere else, it's midday in Toronto, and it shouldn't be this dark yet, and there's at least one ghost that Hale didn't tell her about in his semi-exhaustive list of the features of this old place. So she watches the stars, the dim edge of the Milky Way, realizing after a while that it's getting even dimmer, and one side of the sky is turning grey. 

And then, she blinks, and when she opens her eyes again, the sky is brilliant blue and there's sunlight streaming through the window and the glass door, and everything is glass and sandy-white. The sage is crooked and black-edged in the ashtray. 

And the fedora's still there.  
***

With the daylight burning white at the edges of the windows, she walks through each of the rooms, the white fedora on her head, Hale's letter in her hand. Dim, bare hallways—the place seems completely deserted. Not a whisper of maids or kitchen staff and frankly thank _god_ , because she wouldn't know what to do with that (actually, she does. She'd get massages for years and mani-pedis to make up for all the ones Mama never gave her because her boyfriend spent all their money _again_ and she never got to take because Bo compulsively gave their money to someone else _again_ , and yes they had enough to make it and Bo was too damn adorable to argue with over it but holy god the Fae around here better learn to like _cheeseburgers_ ). 

She also doesn't need Hale's teenage scrawl describing the paintings and historical pieces in the house that mysteriously _aren't there_ to know that someone came through and cleaned the place out—there's no hooks or cracks or anything, and the paint is even and looks properly aged, but the dust is far too thin for a place this large and this old next to the sea with no staff. Figures. Daddy Santiago wouldn't want any family heirlooms to go to a _human_. Except, apparently, the creepy suit of armor set into the wall—it's probably a golem of some kind. It takes all her effort not to flinch every time she walks past it. 

They left his room more or less intact, though. She's not sure if she's glad, or insulted on Hale's behalf. 

She goes through his shirts; they smell more like the air around here than they do of him, but she knows how he likes his shirts cut and it seems like that holds true all the way back to the Middle Ages. There's a desk with books that she knows for a fact he never touched and a bottle of cologne that's probably older than she is. 

She sprays some into the air—she knows better than to apply anything Fae directly to her skin anymore—and she closes her eyes and feels the sound wrap around her and she could swear that's his fingers running through her hair instead of the wind, because it's _him_. 

Maybe it's okay that there's no one else here for this. 

***

Once she'd convinced herself the house wasn't going to kill her, she sort of fell into a dream, images she's had in her head since she was a feverish little shit in the sewers. 

It does seem like a hallucination, because she's _always_ ended up in places like this—always picked or conned or fainted her way into them, even though she never belonged there, not really; places too rich or suburban or expensive or WASP-y, and Kenzi was always the pretender there. Bo was the princess and Kenzi got to serve drinks in heaven. There was always some narc waiting to sell her out and remind her that no matter how genuine the invitation, it wasn't her house, and she was just something they tolerated. 

But for once, she could be the hero of the story. For once, it was _her_ house. She could get the ending she deserved (well, _he_ would have been there, too, but the world still owes her for so much more than him). And she could spend forever on a beach in a white flowy dress from a store she couldn't afford to set _foot_ in before, looking out at the ocean while the waves soothed something hard and choked inside her. Until the salt washed away the sewer grime and caked mascara and the leering eyes and hands lingering all over her body. 

Yeah, that lasted maybe two weeks. 

There's a town nearby, and once you get past the fact that the church is older than _Canada_ , it's pretty much everywhere else she's ever been—a riot of voices, the play of traffic and sunlight—

Plenty of suckers with big wallets. 

She's heard plenty of Spanish in her life; and anyways, it sounds a little like French, if you listen. 

It's the noisy places she feels him, anyways. Slipping through the shadowed arches around the plaza, through the voices saying so many things in languages that sound familiar and strange. She closes her eyes and falls unseen through the sound, his fingers sifting through her hair— 

And then she's folded into the hum, leaving her mark one wallet shorter, and she swears she hears someone laughing. She flips a coin into the shell on the fountain, flashing arc and _thank you_ in the tidal play of the crowds, the chatter washing off the arches and the walls, and her darting in and out, shadow to shadow. 

They're still kissing. 

***

Of _course_ it rained today; of course the sunflowers were wilting, and of course the sea was blue _and_ grey, like the swirl of the Atlantic near Toronto, and she misses him, and she misses Bo. 

She doesn't _miss_ Bo, when she thinks of who Bo's become; doesn't want the endless drama and being ignored and insulted and the roller coaster of one lover after another while she sits and reads another shitty romance novel co-starring some well-muscled douche who probably started hitting the girl after the end of the book. 

What she misses is that thing, the thing that made the stupid patched-up leaky walls and the endless stalemate over laundry and dishes and the sex antics at all hours of the day and/or night and/or over breakfast (literally)—that thing that made it all worth it. 

She could say it was Bo's smile, that fragile little thing that she'd give to Kenzi or Dyson or, hell, _Lauren_ ; that smile that makes Kenzi want to kill the people who made it so shaky around the edges. She'd carve out eyeballs to watch it get a little brighter, find a home on that face. She could say that it's because Bo doesn't smile like that anymore; hardly smiles at all. 

But the truth is, she doesn't remember what it even was, what made it all so special, and she misses that she doesn't even know what she misses anymore. 

She could say she misses Bo, but the person she misses isn't Bo. And the person she is, isn't Kenzi; but this is all that's left. This is all that's left. 

There was a time when she would've accepted anything; anything to belong. But Kenzi doesn't belong to anyone, anymore. She's tired of belonging. 

Her hands are shaking as she lifts out one of his shirts from the middle drawer, this red-and-black silk thing pressed in a way that only years of gravity can manage, and the silk is heavy and soft and all she can think about it is ripping it, tearing it and the memories like they're made of glass, tearing whatever's left of him and them and Bo and Kenzi and everything she left there and everything she brought with her to pieces. 

Because no matter how far she goes, she can't get away from it. 

Somehow, though, it still comes out in one piece—no, wait—

—The shirt tangles, heavier than it should be; something's sliding down the inside of it. She lifts until it tumbles out—

It's a book. 

She picks it up and brushes off the cover even though it's spotless, damn near new, leather smooth and thick against her fingers, worked along the very edge of the cover. Drawings, writing—no runes, thank god, but she's seen this before; it reminds her of Dyson, the tattoo on his back. Maybe it was from him? 

She could be holding the very beginnings of their bromance in her hands. She bites her tongue; almost puts it back. It's really not hers to look at; it's between Dyson and Hale. 

… Who totally left the house, book included, to her. 

She flops down on the bed, shirt strewn forgotten next to her, and carefully eases the binding open. It's not even brittle; is it even _real_? 

Something about the thickness of the pages reminds her of Trick's books, though, and she thinks it is. 

And her Spanish sucks, and Hale's calligraphy is nearly indecipherable, but she thinks she can make out the first couple of sentences, and her blood freezes: “ _Necesito esconder ese libro de mi padre. Supo algo horrible_...”


End file.
